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Karl Marx

240 quotes

• “Bourgeois society continuously brings forth the Jew from its own entrails.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: as quoted in "Nationalism and Socialism: Marxist and Labor Theories of Nationalism to 1917", Horace B. Davis, New York: NY, Monthly Review Press (2009) p. 72. Original: Marx, "Zur Judenfrange" in "Werke", I, (1843) pp. …

• “The worker's existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and it is a bit of luck for him if he can find a buyer, And the demand on which the life of the worker depends, depends on the whim of the rich and the capitalists.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Communism… is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property, and first brings to realization the original tendency inherent in land-division, namely, equality. In the same way association also re-establishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering, and through free labour and free enjoyment becomes once more a true personal property of man.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As for large landed property, its defenders have always, sophistically, identified the economic advantages offered by large-scale agriculture with large-scale landed property, as if it were not precisely as a result of the abolition of property that this advantage, for one thing, would receive its greatest possible extension, and, for another, only then would be of social benefit.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Der Philosoph legt sich – also selbst eine abstrakte Gestalt des entfremdeten Menschen – als den Maßstab der entfremdeten Welt an.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will com to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very severe and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have gained beforehand a consciousness of the limited character a well as of the goal of this historical movement - and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He who can buy bravery is brace, though a coward. As money is not exchanged for anyone specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity - and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour's realization is its objectification.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1845 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Absolute Criticism’s Second Campaign, Ch. 6:2a p.116 (1845)

• “The emancipation of the Jews into human beings, or the human emancipation of Jewry, was therefore not conceived, as by Herr Bauer, as the special task of the Jews, but as a general practical task of the present-day world, which is Jewish to the core. It was proved that the task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is actually the task of abolishing the Jewish character of civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of the present-day practice of life, the most extreme expression of which is the money system.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Undeterred by this examination, the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf’s conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf’s friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but is it nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the hoe market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and broad as much as possible by differential duties.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Nicht das Bewußtsein bestimmt das Leben, sondern das Leben bestimmt das Bewußtsein.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Sprache entsteht, wie das Bewußtsein, erst aus dem Bedürfnis, der Notdurft des Verkehrs mit anderen Menschen.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests the common interest of all the members of society, that is, sality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Hegel bemerkte irgendwo, daß alle großen weltgeschichtlichen Tatsachen und Personen sich sozusagen zweimal ereignen. Er hat vergessen, hinzuzufügen: das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The object before us, to begin with, material production.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The industrial peak of a people when its main concern is not yet gain, but rather to gain.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The object of art — like every other product — creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and saga of the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The unity is brought about by force.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing it or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual's pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others' interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Die Ideen exis­tie­ren nicht ge­trennt von der Spra­che.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Money appears as measure (in Homer, e.g. oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange,because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange. But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In fact of course, this 'productive' worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn't give a damn for the junk.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Surplus value is exactly equal to surplus labour; the increase of the one [is] exactly measured by the diminution of necessary labour.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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